The Boy Beyond the Garden

Ch. 1 The Girl In the Seashell

Author's Note

Welcome to The Boy Beyond the Garden, a dark fairytale AU inspired by Thumbelina and Attack on Titan.

This story takes place in an early-1800s version of Paradis, where tiny hidden societies, old magic, strange creatures, and human grief exist side by side. While it begins softly, this story will include darker fairytale elements such as kidnapping, possession, arranged marriage, fear, grief, and the struggle between safety and freedom.

Y/N is written as an adult reader-insert character. Her appearance is intentionally left open.

For readers on desktop who prefer seeing their own name instead of "Y/N," there is a Chrome extension called POV: Y/N Replacer for Wattpad and AO3 that may help replace reader-insert placeholders while you read. If you do not use Chrome, check your browser's extension store to see if there is a similar option available.

Thank you for reading.

— LoVe_LoRn

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Once, long ago, in the Paradis countryside, beyond the riverside village of Thistlewick, there stood a secluded cottage surrounded by gardens.

The nearest villagers knew it as the home of a quiet woman who could coax remedies from stubborn roots, mend a torn sleeve so finely that the seam disappeared, and paint the likeness of a flower with such care that one might mistake the picture for the living thing.

Her herbs, embroidery, preserves, and botanical drawings appeared regularly at the Thistlewick market. When illness entered a household, she was sometimes called upon to prepare a tonic or sit beside the sick. When a garden failed to bloom, people sought her advice.

Yet few were ever invited beyond her gate.

Fewer still had entered her home.

And no one in Thistlewick knew that, in a garden where no blue poppies had ever grown, the grieving woman had once found one blooming beneath her window.

It appeared sometime between twilight and dawn.

The evening before, the earth beneath the window had been bare except for several sprigs of thyme and a stubborn patch of clover the woman had intended to pull. Yet when she stepped into the garden the following morning, carrying a basket beneath one arm and a pair of pruning shears in the other, she found a tall green stem rising from the soil.

At its crown rested a single open flower.

The woman stopped so suddenly that the basket slipped from her arm.

Rosemary, folded linen, and freshly cut lavender scattered across the path, but she did not bend to gather them. She could only stare.

She had tended the garden for many years. She knew which bulbs slept beneath every flower bed, which seeds the wind carried in, and which plants had crept through the fence from neighboring fields. She knew the pale faces of the daisies, the thorned tempers of the roses, and the names of weeds that pretended to be flowers until they had strangled everything around them.

But she had never planted a poppy there.

Certainly not one like this.

Its petals were blue—not the pale blue of morning mist or the faded blue of distant hills, but a deep, impossible color that seemed to have gathered the final shadows of night and kept them. Fine silver veins ran through every petal, visible only when the sunlight touched them. At the center rested a dark velvet crown dusted with gold.

The flower faced upward.

It did not bow beneath the dew or turn away from the morning. It stood open to the sky as though it had been waiting all night for the sun to find it.